Have you ever walked past an unmarked grave and wondered who was buried there and what their life story was, or whether anyone would remember them?

They are questions that have played on the mind of Manning Valley woman Gloria Toohey, who has seen many unmarked graves at old cemeteries and burial sites across her local region on the New South Wales mid-north coast.

Ms Toohey, the research officer at the Manning Wallamba Family History Society, said about seven years ago the group decided to try and identify unmarked graves in the region.

She said the group felt if it did not take action, many lives would be forgotten, with no formal record of their existence.

"You walk through an old cemetery and it's just a mowed area, and you can see all the undulations and little bumps, and you know it's an unmarked grave there," she said.

"And you think, oh those poor people, there's no one here to record their history, no one here to acknowledge their names.

"We felt we needed to catalogue the names. We don't have exact burial plots, but we do have, in most cases, the cemeteries where people are buried, and also all the little isolated cemeteries and graves on private property."

Detective work uncovers identities

Ms Toohey said so far the group had identified 1,500 unmarked graves and locations, but still had a long way to go.

She said there was a lot of detective work involved, using old records and diaries as well as word of mouth.

A large percentage of names found in the NSW death register indexes for the area do not appear in records held by councils, cemetery indexes or other records available.

"We find them in all sorts of places. We have a lot of death certificates in our society," she said.

"We check all of them to see if there are recorded burials for those people.

"We have hundreds of books on family histories, so we start delving through them and things keep appearing.

"There's four or five of us working on it, and I'm the main person recording it all."

Old records reveal tales of loss and hardship

Ms Toohey said many of the unmarked grave sites were those of young children, and she had come upon some sad tales.

"There's one that really touched me, and it was a diary note from the 1870s that just said 'The little fellow is sick with the bad throat, he's the best one we've ever had … he didn't make it through the night, we've buried him in Kennedy's paddock'.

"He was one of nine children and we found that in the diary of a local school teacher who was teaching at one of the little schools," she said.

Ms Toohey said she had also been working with a local Aboriginal community, and focused in particular on the old Purfleet cemetery, where the group had already identified about 150 people buried in unmarked graves.

"There's also a lot of tiny heritage cemeteries like Pilot Hill at Harrington, where we've tried to put the whole cemetery in," she said.

"There's a bloke who came through central Queensland by the name of Billy Sing, and he was a crack shot with a rifle," he said.

"He signed up in World War I, we sent him off to Egypt first, and then to Gallipoli where he was made a sniper.

"He took out over 150 Turks and he had some terrible names attached to him. They called him the murderer, the assassin, so these were things he lived with during the time he was doing that job, and afterwards when he came back to Australia.

"Billy was buried in an unmarked grave for over 50 years until one of the local politicians, by the name of Don Cameron, found out about the story and went out and made sure he got a marker, to mark where he lies now, so people can go out and pay tribute to what he did."